Trump’s unfinished business for ‘Greater Israel’

By Jonathan Adler

From annexation to UNRWA, Trump’s Israel advisors should be taken at their word — and Democrats won’t stand in their way, says Lara Friedman.

On Nov. 5, former president Donald Trump secured a resounding victory over Vice President Kamala Harris in the U.S. presidential elections, winning all seven battleground states in the electoral college, as well as the popular vote — the first for a Republican candidate in two decades. It’s clear that discontent with the Biden-Harris Gaza policy wasn’t the deciding factor in Harris’s loss that many had predicted, given the margins of Trump’s win. But it did play a significant role, and Democrats will need to make a meaningful investment to win back Muslim and Arab American voters, in particular, in future election cycles. Trump’s victory, on the other hand, doesn’t seem to be evidence of a popular shift to the right on U.S. policy toward Israel, even though that may well be the result of his return to office.

To unpack the election results and understand the implications of a second Trump term for U.S. policy on Israel-Palestine, +972 Magazine spoke with Lara Friedman, president of the Foundation for Middle East Peace (FMEP) and a longtime expert on American and Israeli politics (full disclosure: FMEP is a funder of +972 Magazine). For Friedman, last week revealed the consequences of Democrats’ failure to take the concerns of its base seriously — simply assuming that they would turn out to support Harris — and of trying to outflank Republicans on their pro-Israel bona fides as part of their appeal to the so-called centrist voter. This was a lesson, as Friedman points out, that Democrats could have learned from their Israeli counterparts in the Labor Party, which has rendered itself obsolete by failing to offer a real alternative to the Israeli right.

After a year of devastating war in Gaza, aided and abetted by a Democratic administration unwilling to impose any red lines on the Israeli government, Trump made a cynical yet effective last-minute appeal to disaffected voters, pitching himself as the “anti-war” candidate who could secure a quick and lasting peace. Friedman, however, suggests that we should not look to Trump but to those around him — to figures like former ambassador David Friedman, Jason Greenblatt, and others who pledge to continue the unfinished work of Trump’s first term. These are the people who will be at the center of what Friedman calls a “Greater Israel” period in U.S. policy: supporting Israeli annexation and ethnic cleansing in the West Bank, Gaza, and parts of Lebanon; lifting sanctions on settlers; and preventing any bans on weapons transfers. “They have lists of things that they are ready to do,” Friedman says, warning that we should take them at their word.

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Friedman is also one of the foremost analysts of Congressional legislative developments relating to Israel-Palestine — an aspect of U.S. policy toward the region that often flies under the radar of mainstream media coverage, but is essential to help understand what we should expect when Trump returns to office in January. On many issues regarding Israel-Palestine, from advancing the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of antisemitism to sanctioning the International Criminal Court (ICC) for taking action against Israel, there is longstanding and bipartisan pro-Israel consensus in Congress. And there is no reason, Friedman argues, to believe that many Democrats will grow a backbone under Trump.

The interview has been edited for length and clarity.

What are your main takeaways from last week’s election results?

This is obviously a moment of reckoning for Democrats, and Gaza did play a role. If you look at Senator [Bob] Casey’s loss in Pennsylvania, for example, where the amount [of votes] he lost by is smaller than the number of people who voted for the Green Party candidate, who’s a Palestinian American, that seat alone is clearly Gaza-impacted. 

And one can argue that it’s impacted even more by the fact that people didn’t show up. If the normal number of voters had shown up, then [anger about Gaza] probably wouldn’t have mattered. The percentage of the [vote for] Green Party [candidates] isn’t greater than in previous years. But this year, it had a definitive impact. 

We’re still waiting to see final numbers, but I think turnout is a big piece of it. And to the extent that the Democratic Party assumed that they would have a similar turnout to the last Biden election [in 2020], where you had a really energized base, I think they assumed wrong. Gaza is a piece of the disillusionment of this base: the cynicism, the sense that “this party doesn’t care about me and isn’t reflecting me.” A lot of people either didn’t show up, voted for a third-party candidate, or voted for Trump. And we have clear evidence of this where, down ballot, the Democrats outperformed Harris: [in Michigan], a state where Harris lost but Rashida Tlaib won, or [in Minnesota], where Harris did worse than Ilhan Omar.

There are some very simplistic arguments [about the election outcome being a result of] the fact that [Harris] is a woman or that she’s black. We actually had significant successes for female candidates and women of color in this election, where they did better on the same ticket than she did. Even [Rep. Elissa] Slotkin, a Jewish woman, won a Senate seat in Michigan while Harris lost. So no one can say this is about antisemitism. And Slotkin differentiated herself from Harris: she actually spoke in terms that expressed compassion, empathy, and care for Palestinians. Did it go as far as some of us would have liked? No. Did it go far enough [for constituents] to say, “I believe you, I think you care”? Apparently it did. And that makes a difference.

For years, I’ve been saying to friends in the Democratic Party that if you want a warning for what can happen [here], look at the Labor Party in Israel. If your strategy [to win] is consistently to try to attract people from the right and center right, taking for granted your own base — assuming that “our own base will vote for us no matter what, and that we can win without the people on the far edges of that base” — the Labor Party is a really good example of where that takes you.

Years ago, in the period after the Second Intifada, I was talking to a friend in a Labor Party leadership position. This was when [the party] was saying, “We can’t touch the Palestine issue — it’ll destroy us. We have to keep leaning to the center.” I told them, “You can either wear this issue as a crown and own it and be proud of it and have a clear agenda, and then if you win you’ve got a mandate and if you lose you can criticize the other [party] for not doing what they should have done. Or you can wear it as a heavy chain that will drag you to the bottom of the sea in every election.” 

And that’s where we are today: the Labor Party has moved to the right and [as a result] almost out of existence, because the [Israeli] right doesn’t vote for it — they’re not going to vote for “Likud lite,” they’re going to vote for Likud. And we essentially have an Israeli political spectrum that is a battle between parties from the center-right to the far-right and some vestigial left-wing parties. So there’s something for Democrats to learn from the Israeli experience.

So looking at Slotkin’s reelection, or races like Summer Lee’s in Pennsylvania, do you see any new openings for Palestinian rights advocacy — or at least a reflection of the fact that taking a strong, pro-Palestine stance is not an electoral liability?

That’s going to depend fundamentally on the Democratic Party and who it decides to listen to when it learns the lessons of this election. We already saw learned pundits on TV during the election saying Democrats were losing because they weren’t pro-Israel enough. We’re seeing analysis that if they attacked more in the pro-Israel direction, they would have captured whatever part of the Jewish community didn’t vote for them, which is ridiculous — there’s a certain percentage that always votes Republican. 

The bottom line is that you’ve had clear messages from the Democratic electorate that there is a broad spectrum of views on Gaza and on Israel, which precedes this election, and that there is a lot of space to be more even-handed. 

Since the Oslo Accords, the Democratic Party has chosen to continually move further and further to the right [on Israel], and from the Obama era onward, to the [position of] no daylight [between the U.S. and Israel], shoulder-to-shoulder; they are not just with the Republicans, they’re to the right of the Republicans on this. And [that comes] with a clear statement to the base: “We simply don’t care about you, or maybe we consider you a liability and would rather have you mad at us because we think we can gain more from the right than by actually keeping our left. We’re so convinced that you’ll vote for us no matter what, or that we can win without you.”

We saw this a little bit with the Bernie [Sanders presidential] campaign [in 2016]. I remember talking to someone on the Clinton campaign after Bernie dropped out, and they were still showing open contempt for Bernie [supporters]. This person looked at me and said, “We don’t need them. We can win without them.” If you have contempt for your base, at some point your base is going to have contempt for you.

When a significant, decisive portion of your base either casts a protest vote or stays home — effectively saying, “I can’t support you at this point,” or “I’d rather let you lose and learn a lesson than continue to be implicated in policies that are anathema to my values” — does that lesson get learned?

I want to shift from the election results to discussing more about what we expect when Trump takes office in January. To start, could you outline the anticipated policy priorities of a second Trump administration toward Israel-Palestine?

Israel-Palestine has never been central for Trump personally, but it is central for a number of the people who he feels accountable to or cares about — starting with Miriam Adelson, who was one of his top donors.

It’s useful to look at what’s unfinished from [the first Trump administration’s] agenda. The selection of Mike Huckabee as ambassador to Israel [who denies that Israel is even occupying the West Bank] proves that Trump intends to advance and claim credit for achieving the “Greater Israel” dreams of messianic Zionist Jews and evangelical Christians. With Gaza, Hagit Ofran from Peace Now was quoted in Haaretz saying she thinks there are going to be settlements before inauguration.

I think we’re in a “Greater Israel” policy period. They’ve already talked about Israel’s right to gain territory that is taken in self-defense, which of course is an outright repudiation of international law. That was the framing of the statement when [the first Trump administration] recognized Israel’s annexation of the Golan [Heights], and I think it’s going to be applied to Gaza. I think the annexation of the West Bank is on the table, and annexation of parts of Lebanon is on the table. Don’t listen to me, listen to them.

Eugene Kontorovich [of the infamous right-wing Israeli think-tank Kohelet Policy Forum] laid out his list of things that the Trump administration should do to undo all the evils that were done by the Biden administration — starting with ending sanctions on settlers, which they consider a form of BDS. That effectively means a policy of greenlighting settler terrorism.

By the way, Kontorovich is also calling for the Trump administration to actively support the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from Gaza by helping them flee the war. His framing is that the Trump administration needs to treat the Gaza border the way Biden treated the Mexico border, [which was supposedly] an open border. So you should force Egypt to open the Gaza border, and then incentivize or compel people to cross it and leave once and for all.

If you look at Jewish-American groups, the number one agenda item on almost all of their wishlists is [codifying into law the] IHRA definition [of antisemitism]. They make it clear that, as we’ve always known, that’s really about quashing criticism of Israel and Zionism, particularly on campuses, but also beyond. And that agenda item already has momentum in Congress and it’s largely bipartisan: Republicans are leading it, but Democrats have done nothing to stand in the way, and in most cases have joined in — because who doesn’t want to be in favor of fighting antisemitism, even if that now is code for shutting down free speech, free thought, free academia.

I think what you’re going to see [under Trump] is an absolute undoing of anything that is in any way framed as a Biden anti-Israel gesture, which will include giving Israel any weapons it wants, support for annexation, and support for continued war with a call not for a ceasefire but for “victory.” There’s speculation on whether there [will be] some limits because Trump doesn’t like the U.S. to be engaged in foreign wars, or he’s annoyed with [Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu’s personality. That all may be true, but I tend to [focus on] the forces inside his team, which really see this as “Israel’s policy is our policy and there shall be no distinction.”

The big question for me is Iran — whether or not a president who’s been elected on an agenda of not getting involved in foreign wars ends up being led into one with Iran by his own people and by Netanyahu, which I think is a very high possibility.

As you pointed out, all these ways that people like Kontorovich frame the Biden years as somehow “anti-Israel,” even in a limited sense, belies the unconditional support that Israel has received under this Democratic administration. And on that point in particular, are there ways that you see Biden’s unconditional support for Israel — and the affirmation that there are indeed no “red lines” when it comes to Israel’s war in Gaza and now Lebanon — as having paved the way for a Trump administration assault on international law, institutions, and diplomacy?

Yes – there’s no question. Democrats are already on board with sanctioning the ICC, shutting down UNRWA, and not allowing the world to hold Israel accountable under international law for anything it does. And this is already bipartisan. [There’s] this idea that now that Trump is doing it, maybe more Democrats will stand up and oppose it, and that’s possible. Republicans will then call them hypocrites and they won’t be wrong. [But] I don’t see that [happening] — I don’t suddenly see a backbone emerging from people who had none for the past year.

The people in [Trump’s first] administration who are focused on Israel, or people around this administration like Kontorovich, or even people who are close to [Trump] in Congress, some of whom may end up with cabinet positions — they have lists of things that they are ready to do. Ending UNRWA is one of them.

In his piece, Kontorovich not only talks about ending UNRWA, but also about the U.S. government actually erasing the agency’s diplomatic immunity so that Israel can start suing UNRWA officials for terrorism. If people who work for the UN can be sued by individual states for terrorism for having carried out the humanitarian work of their agency, this is the end of the UN system. People ask why can’t UNRWA still operate in Gaza without Israel’s permission: if Israel is going to treat people who are in UNRWA convoys as people who they can bomb at will, nobody can work there.

On Nov. 4, Senator [Ted] Cruz and 10 other Senate Republicans, all of whom will be [in Congress] next year, wrote a letter in response to an effort to get Israel suspended from the UN General Assembly for systematically violating international law, violating UN Security Council resolutions, and committing genocide. They basically say that if the Palestinians pursue this, we’re going to open the drawer and pull out every possible sanction against Palestinians and any states or organizations that work with them. It’s essentially a recipe to not just erase the Oslo Accords, but to set us back to pre-Madrid [in 1991] — to a period when the U.S. position is that any form of Palestinian organizing or public speaking or political activity is terrorism and anyone who touches it is tainted by terror.

We have to be really honest with ourselves about what door is being opened here. And if they move forward with that in law, I don’t think Senate Democrats are going to oppose it. It is almost an article of faith in our Congress — House and Senate — that the UN doing anything on Israel is illegitimate and antisemitic, and that it is a U.S. obligation to block it, even if that potentially means taking down the UN. We have legislation that dates back decades before Madrid and Oslo, which is still in force, [saying] that if the Palestinians are admitted as a full state, we exit the UN and defund it, which effectively brings it down: if the United States isn’t there, there is no UN. Nobody, not even Democrats, are ever willing to reexamine that piece of law.

On UNRWA in particular, I assume we’ll see a permanent funding ban that was initially “punted” until March 2025, as you put it when the temporary ban was passed, as well as other attacks on the agency.

I should say that [the Trump administration] doesn’t need Congress to do that. I think it’s worth remembering what they did last time in office, and the Republican framing since then, because people don’t remember. Last week, I published a database that I’d compiled months ago in my obsessiveness and frustration, because I kept hearing people from the Trump administration [criticize] Biden when he resumed aid to UNRWA, saying [that under Trump] they cut off aid because they knew it was a terrorist organization. I pulled up every statement made by any Trump administration official, including people who were being nominated for positions — these are official statements of policy — and none of them mentioned terrorism.

They were targeting UNRWA because they wanted to take [the question of Palestinian] refugees off the table. They also wanted to stop paying for it; [they wanted] Gulf countries or someone else to do so. But fundamentally, it’s about refugees: we’re going to define refugees out of existence by getting rid of UNRWA. It’s inconceivable to me that, regardless of what Congress does, the Trump administration wouldn’t reinstate that policy [of cutting aid to UNRWA]. The question is, does Congress put it into law to make sure that no president ever again can come back and change it? I think that’s quite plausible, and given the way Congress works, my guess is that we’re going to see anti-UNRWA legislation that has consequences attached to it: [for instance,] saying if the UN doesn’t dissolve UNRWA, then there are going to be sanctions.

There are Democrats like Rep. Josh Gottheimer and others who are totally on board and involved with the anti-UNRWA onslaught. But besides those people, do you see this anti-UNRWA crusade under Trump and in a Republican Congress as one place that Democrats could try to push back?

Maybe. We had some Democratic pushback already — some big letters and the UNRWA Restoration Act and all that. 

I will say that one of the things that concerns me, having seen various versions of those letters and bills before they went up, is that even among Democrats who are standing up for UNRWA, a lot of them are using language like, “for now, there’s no alternative,” or “for the time being.” Many Democrats who have defended UNRWA so far have done so on the grounds that this is a humanitarian issue in Gaza. They don’t understand the political reasons why people are trying to destroy UNRWA. Yes, we’re in the middle of a genocide and humanitarian catastrophe, so humanitarian aid is absolutely the driving factor why people will intervene. But this isn’t merely about humanitarian aid. 

Israel and the Trump administration may successfully [convince Democrats] that there’s another way to get humanitarian aid [into Gaza]. But I don’t think they will, because [Israel] is not trying to get humanitarian aid in. The Israeli government wants to clear people out of Gaza; they’ve been quite explicit about that. And I think the Trump administration would be perfectly happy with this policy. 

At the beginning of the war, we saw Israelis framing the clearing of Palestinians out of Gaza as a humanitarian measure, [and suggestions] that they were going to set up camps in the Sinai desert where people could get all the aid they need [once] they leave. I think that’s where we’re headed: a game of humanitarian aid being code for ethnic cleansing. And it’s going to be interesting to see whether Democrats who have stood up for UNRWA are captured by that.

I keep hearing well-intentioned people trying to get policymakers to understand that ending UNRWA, including in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, will be a humanitarian catastrophe so they can’t let it happen. But humanitarian catastrophe is the point. It is a feature, not a bug. Humanitarian catastrophe is a tool of ethnic cleansing. 

If [the situation in Gaza] becomes so bad that the international community finally acquiesces to [the idea that] everybody must get out of Gaza to receive aid, that’s a win for Israel. If the situation in Shuafat refugee camp, which was already dire before this, becomes truly unlivable, and we have a polio epidemic [that requires] moving people across the Jordan border to get them the health care they need, it’s a win for Israel. Israel would love to see the refugee camp removed: there are settlements all around it that would love to expand into that space. 

I’m not trying to be cynical or hyperbolic; this is the reality [of what Israeli officials] are saying.

I want to shift back to the domestic implications of Trump’s return to office and the likelihood of a crackdown on pro-Palestine activism in the United States, which we’ve seen most recently outlined in places like the Heritage Foundation’s Project Esther. Could you explain how these plans are tied to a longer history of legislative developments that you and FMEP have been tracking, which may have gone under the radar over the past few years but will certainly accelerate if Republicans maintain control of the White House, Senate, and House — or even if Democrats control the House, and there are enough pro-Israel Democrats willing to work with Republicans?

The [rhetoric] of “We are the people fighting antisemitism” has proven incredibly valuable to Republicans, both in Congress and at the grassroots [level]. It is a standard flag that they fly as they target anything they view as woke or otherwise hostile to a very hardline illiberal agenda — and academia is at the top of this.

This started before October 7, but the surge in activism in support of Palestinian lives and rights really fueled the Republican anti-woke agenda, under the guise of fighting antisemitism. We saw this earlier when the anti-BDS legislation started being repurposed as anti-CRT [critical race theory] and anti-DEI [diversity, equity, and inclusion] and anti-ESG [environment, social, and governance]. You’ve got these laws that use state contracts as the hook to punish people for BDS, and then you just edit it slightly, and now you can use it against the entire [list] of things you don’t like.

In terms of where this goes now, I am of two minds. On the one hand, I think it would be inconceivable that this [cynical weaponization of antisemitism] will not continue and expand. This is a powerful weapon for the far right: it aligns with Christian evangelical views and the views of a lot of the messianic Jews in Trump’s orbit, those who have accepted Christ as their Lord and Savior but still identify as Jews. It’s been really effective at either bringing Democrats on board or at least making it hard for them to protest because as soon as [they do], that proves they don’t care about antisemitism.

At the same time, some of this depends on how much the public narrative ends up hitting a wall with reality, or whether reality gives in to the public narrative. I’ll cite two pieces of legislation where I think this is important.

One is a bill that was passed by the House earlier this year that would give the Secretary of Treasury nearly unfettered authority to strip the nonprofit status from any U.S. organization that that secretary decides, just by fiat, has links to terrorism. There is no oversight and virtually no meaningful recourse. That passed the House, and then it got stuck. The other bill is the Antisemitism Awareness Act, which various Jewish groups have been pushing for years and would codify the IHRA definition into law. It passed the House earlier this year, and then it, too, hit a wall.

Both of them hit a wall not simply because progressives pointed out that they were dangerous, illiberal, and a threat to free speech, but also because the right wing considered them to be an overreach. On the NGO bill, [right wing] people recognized that it could be used by a Democratic president to target all of their organizations. They saw how this could be expanded to allow the IRS to tell NGOs what they can and can’t do.

The NGO bill finally went up for a vote yesterday [Nov. 12]. But it failed because Republican leaders brought it to the floor under a rule that requires a two-thirds majority to pass. If it had come to the floor under normal order — which it still can — it would have easily passed. And the fact that 52 Dems voted for it, notwithstanding the election of Trump, really says it all.

On the IHRA bill, Axios reported recently that [Sen. Chuck] Schumer has promised to move the bill in the Senate during the lame-duck [period]. The article framed it as a controversial bill among Democrats — as if it’s the Democratic Party giving in to its far-left base on a bill that everybody else agrees should be passed. Except that’s total bullshit: just look at the record when it passed the House. There was an outpouring of opposition to this bill from the entire right wing — from the crazy “we can’t pass this because it’ll make antisemitism illegal,” to the free speech absolutists, to the libertarians, to a whole set of people who argued that this was stealth DEI.

Somehow, we now have a narrative that it’s the left that’s preventing the bill, when in fact it was the right that stopped it. And we have papers like Jewish Insider that, at the time, reported it accurately, but now is enabling this narrative that the left is in the way. We’re going to know soon; we’re now in lame duck. Does Schumer bring it up? And all of those people on the right who cried foul when it passed the House, do they stay silent? I don’t know. When the public narrative meets reality, which one gives? And given current politics in the United States, I don’t know.